


explosive matchmaking

by preromantics



Category: Actor RPF, Star Trek RPF
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-05-16
Updated: 2010-05-16
Packaged: 2017-10-09 12:04:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,354
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/87127
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/preromantics/pseuds/preromantics
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Wherein Shia has a plan to set their respective explosion-happy directors on a playdate, and Zach isn't a hipster, he's just embodying NYC, really. <i>Zach, in the matter of how everyone in L.A. knows everyone else, somehow, theoretically knows that the kid weaving his way through the afterparty crowd at Marmont is Shia LaBeouf.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	explosive matchmaking

**Author's Note:**

> This is the combined fault of [info]paitac and people allowing me to try and think at 4:30 in the morning.

Zach, in the matter of how everyone in L.A. knows everyone else, somehow, theoretically knows that the kid weaving his way through the afterparty crowd at Marmont is Shia LaBeouf, in that distant way where he recalls him being in Transformers and then a Disney show that Zach has flipped on mute before while going through a script.

Zach doesn't really expect Shia to actually be weaving his way through the crowd to get to him, but it's not like Zach hasn't been approached by stranger people, (Jack Black had talked to him earlier in the night, which was mostly a disaster of a conversation, but Zach took any conversation at an afterparty that made it more than five words – questions about drinks and bathrooms excluded – as a win for the night.

“Hey,” Shia says, halfway over someone's shoulder before he can swing around them to get closer to Zach, “Hey, man.” He raises his drink in a fashion obviously intended to be a greeting, and it looks like he's got a light beer in a wine glass.

“Ran out of glasses,” Shia says, indicating it, “or bottles, I can't remember which right now.”

Zach nods his head because it makes sense in the way that most things make sense after two in the morning. “Zach,” he says, extending a hand.

Shia tries to shake his hand with the hand holding his glass, first, and then he laughs at himself before figuring out how to use his other hand. “I'm Shia,” he says, full of bravado. He swigs back the last of the beer he has in his wine glass and Zach watches, amused, trying to remember if he's ever seen a wine glass look less classy.

“I'm in movies,” Shia says, leaning close, “and --” he trails off, pausing. “Sorry, okay,” he says, “I had more than I thought, you know?”

Again, Zach nods, although at the moment he doesn't actually know. He sort of vaguely wishes he did know, because afterparties are generally so much better when everything is fuzzy and bright at the edges, but last time Zach ended up taking home the wrong person entirely and Zoe had mocked him for weeks about it.

“ – with Michael Bay, man, it would be fucking – I don't know, it would be amazing,” Shia says, and Zach frowns down at him for a second before realizing he'd tuned him out a little.

“Yeah,” Zach agrees, because Shia's tone seems to indicate that he should agree with whatever amazing statement he'd just spit out. “Exactly.”

Shia nods enthusiastically, and reaches forward, handsy, to grab Zach's phone out of his pocket. “So,” he says, “I'm just going to give you my number in the least creepy way possible --” he trails off to type, and Zach stays standing still, feeling slightly confused and also slightly violated, the top of his thigh scratched a little from where Shia had fumbled inside his pocket for the phone.

“Then,” Shia says, like he's finishing a sentence that makes perfect sense, “we can meet up and work on my plan.”

Zach feels his phone drop back into his pocket, although he's not entirely sure how it got there, and Shia is walking away before he can say anything.

John comes up behind him and pats him on his shoulder a few seconds later, and Zach gets out an oddly-timed greeting of “Hey, Cho,” just as his phone vibrates in his pocket.

_'tommrrow lunch at clementine at 2 for adequate hangover time!'_ it says, or tries to say, anyway, because Zach's drunk-to-sober text translator definitely improved during press for Trek, and Eric Bana recently had an entire text conversation with Zach after downing an entire bottle of Jagger halfway across the world so he's had practice.

“Mentoring Hollywood's youth now that your golden days are up?” John asks, because he's sneaky and Zach had to hold his phone up close to his face to read it.

Zach shrugs, because the last ten minutes were not on his expected agenda for the night – (which had been, in order: 1. have one drink, 2. find someone decent to wake up next to in the morning, 3. have another drink, 4. profit, a list which had been borrowed and slightly modified for reasonable acholic intake from Chris months ago,) – and Zach was feeling a little disoriented.

John pats his shoulder again. “Afterparties,” he says, “I know.”

He probably doesn't actually know, or maybe he does, because John tends to know a lot of random things, but Zach sighs in agreement and leaves for home as fast as the gatherings of people will let him pass.

  
-

  
Zach wakes up to his phone alarm, signaling morning yoga because it's a Monday, and that's what healthy people do on monday mornings at seven in the morning, but he rolls over and taps with his fist on his phone screen for as long as it takes to stop playing Ke$ha (and he really has to get around to getting back at whoever set his morning alarm to that, because he definitely never wakes up in the morning feeling like P. Diddy, nor would he want to.)

He gets up for real at ten, showers, eats, takes Noah for a walk and spends an inordinate amount of time staring out his kitchen window while letting Harold headbutt his palm repeatedly, trying to remember why he woke up feeling slightly confused.

At 11:30 he gets a text from someone named 'Syfh YeBuff' and it takes him over a minute before he even gets to the body of the text to realize it's from Shia, who Zach renames in his phone 'Drunk Shia' because he can't remember off the top of his head how to spell the kid's last name.

_'don't forget lunch!'_ the text says, and it takes Zach a minute and some scrolling through texts to figure out where he's supposed to go. He can't figure out why – there was a plan, apparently, so that should make for an interesting afternoon.

-

  
Zach wears a hat and throws on some clothes, and Shia laughs at him when he walks into the little restaurant.

“Hey, man,” Shia says – still laughing a little. Zach isn't sure if he should feel mildly affronted or if Shia is still drunk. “You look like more of a hipster than I remembered!”

So, Zach's going to go with mildly affronted, then. His style is newly more of an embodiment of New York City lately, anyway – at that's what he's going for. Unintentionally, of course.

Zach sits and nods his greeting, surprised to find an espresso shot with ground cinnamon in front of his seat, a particular morning favorite.

“I asked around,” Shia says, by way of explanation.

Zach laughs and downs it. “Thanks,” he says, and Shia looks expectant so he says, “So --”

Shia claps once, which is weird, but sort of fun. “So basically I need you to make this plan work,” he says, and Zach sits back in his chair ready to hear whatever plan he's supposed to be involved in.

Except – the plan is about basically setting just their respective explosion-happy directors on, “A kind of – not a date, like a play date? I was thinking in the desert with a shit load of C-4 plastics and a miniature model of something to repeatedly blow up.”

Although it sounds like something JJ would probably be into, most likely without Michael Bay, who Zach always thinks JJ has some sort of unspoken feud with, mostly Zach just thinks Shia is crazy.

“Did you,” Zach asks, when Shia is done explaining his plan with a lot more hand-movements than Zach would've expected, “have that plan ready for when you met me? Or someone connected to JJ?”

Shia sips from the bottle of his imported beer and then makes a face. “Possibly,” he says. “So, are you in?”

Zach isn't sure what setting up JJ and Bay will do, and he doesn't think anything good would come from it, unless their playdate was purely blowing up things and discussing their mutual dislike of James Cameron, but.

“Sure,” Zach says, folding his napkin into a flower. “Why not.”

He doesn't have much to do right now, anyway.

  
-

  
They walk down from Clementine to a gas station at the corner, because Shia needs a pack of cigarettes and Zach doesn't feel like going home yet.

After, they walk further down to a little park with a track, and Shia smokes and they talk about the cultural impact of Transformers (little to none, with the outlier being Megan Fox) and how they are really two of the least interesting people for the paparazzi to follow around.

Shia plans how they'd do it animatedly. “I'll get the explosives,” he says, “I have a guy, and then we can set it up. Maybe we could get a jet or something, fly them out there and drop them off.”

Zach laughs at him a little, and pets a dog's head as it is walked past them. “What are trying to get out of this?” Zach asks.

Shia stops in his walking and shrugs. “An epic movie,” he says, “and probably a job. There isn't much going on for me in the future.”

Zach nods, knows the feeling. “Alright,” he says. He can deal with that.

  
-

  
Shia doesn't have the best phone etiquette, although at least he seems to have a slightly normal sleeping schedule, since Zach only wakes up to three texts past two in the morning in a week.

Whatever grand plan Shia has, he doesn't really share, beyond going on for hours one night about the type of movie JJ and Bay would make in increasingly less comprehensible texts.

After a week since their meeting at Clementine, and after a week of texts (usually pictures of Shia at intersections in his truck, and once of him on a roof somewhere that looked incredibly peaceful to Zach,) during which Zach starts to find Shia endearing, of all things.

_'explosives secured!! time for action'_, Shia texts, which would usually be threatening in any other context, but Zach just invites Shia to come over whenever he wishes just so he can be amused by whatever the next step of Shia's plan is.

  
-

  
Shia comes over in the afternoon – thankfully without a bunch of explosives in tow, because Zach didn't really want to have to explain to his neighbors why he wasn't actually going to blow up his house. He's pretty sure the son of couple three houses down thinks that he's actually a crazy villain or something, so a lanky guy with scruff and a baseball cap bringing a ton of C-4 over probably wouldn't go over very well.

“A what?” JJ asks, his voice broken over their phone connection when ZQ calls him, Shia spread out over the opposite end of the couch, his barefoot feet out far enough that they rest on ZQ's thigh. “I'm not even in the country, Zach.”

Zach can hear the fresh snap of a can being opened in the background and shakes his head at the phone – JJ and his Diet Cokes, no matter where in the world he is.

“There are explosives,” Zach says, because Shia is frowning exaggeratedly at him from across the couch.

In the background there is a loud, crashing boom, and the phone goes static in Zach's ear for a second.

“Dude,” Shia says, right before Zach can hear yells and laughs on the other end.

“I got explosions covered pretty well right now,” JJ says, after a second, sounding bright and excited. Zach pictures him bouncing in place, which is probably exactly what he's doing. JJ hangs up on him.

Shia sighs when Zach sets his phone down on the coffee table.

“I called Bay earlier,” Shia says, “his PA said he was in a submarine somewhere. It was classified. A fucking submarine, I don't even know.”

Zach sinks back into the couch. “It's not meant to be,” he says, expansively. (He didn't think it would work in the first place, but Shia was so enthused and into the idea that he'd gone along.

“Beer?” Zach asked, because he'd run out for the cheap dry stuff Shia liked and grabbed some good German ale for himself in anticipation of Shia coming over.

“Definitely,” Shia says, eyes lighting up. He kicks his baseball cap up from the coffee table where he'd set it and places it on his head backwards, like he's in beer-ready mode. Zach laughs and takes it off his head, placing it on his own to walk into the kitchen and grab their drinks.

-

  
So the Michael Bay and JJ Abram's playdate of Awesome Explosions doesn't work out, but Shia is pretty good at making out – a little lanky on Zach's lap, and it takes them more than one try to figure out where their legs go, but overall it's pretty good. Zach only feels vaguely creepy about it, except Shia had made really low, rough noises that Zach isn't about to forget anytime soon, so it was worth it.

They walk around Silverlake afterwards as the light is waning, Shia smoking as they walk, rolling his shoulders back. Zach notices cameras about two blocks after his house and walks them to a convenience store so Shia can grab some tea and they can figure out what to do with the rest of the night.

  
-

Chris calls him in the morning, laughing, talking about how Zach is slumming around now. Zach listens and puts Transformers on mute in the background, vaguely watching things explode as Chris talks about a script for a summer play he's really into.

Shia texts him halfway through Chris' call, a picture of a small pile of C-4, with the caption: _'there's only one thing to do. you + me + nevada road trip.'_

Zach texts back with just a smiley face, since Chris is now reading him a monologue over speaker, and thinks about how he and Shia will probably have way better conversations while blowing things up than JJ and Bay ever could.


End file.
